Posts Tagged ‘Diablo 3’

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Diablo III [official site] is a game I’m accustomed to playing on console while curled up on the sofa with another player. We savour the hammy (and sometimes nonsensical) dialogue, take turns examining our inventories for legendary items or tweaking our character builds, and we mash treasure goblins up REAL GOOD.

But I’ve recently found myself wanting to play when I’m solo, tinkering with my inventory as much as I like rather than with a veneer of consideration for the other person in the room and exploring entirely at my own pace.

The most interesting thing about Reaper of Souls, the first expansion for Diablo 3, is that it’s an admission of guilt. Blizzard are one of the best developers in the world not only because it makes great games, but because it prods and tweaks and adds to them after release until they positively hum with glory. But Reaper of Souls isn’t a nip here and a tuck there. This expansion is Blizzard dealing with the reality that, in many people’s eyes, Diablo 3 just wasn’t very good. But can it be fixed?

Diablo III‘s first expansion, Reaper of Souls, won’t explode forth from the Internet’s gleaming loot cavities for another month, but the free patch that includes a healthy chunk of its content is already here right now. Well, if you live in America. It’s not out in other regions yet, but it will be soon. It’s quite a behemoth, with loot of the 2.0 variety flowing from both its wazoos. Rebalanced classes and a new customizable difficulty system are also in, as are revamped bosses and a fully overhauled Paragon leveling system. Basically, this patch is Reaper of Souls’ blanched white backbone. More details below.

Diablo 3 launched, sold millions of copies, but then seemed to almost disappear amid complaints that it lacked an endgame, that its auction house had ruined the thrill of finding new items, and that it was too easy until you’d completed it multiple times.

Blizzard seem to have listened to the complaints, and next year’s expansion, Reaper of Souls, aims to re-define your relationship with the game’s pointy blades and protective armour. First, by removing the auction house, and now with a few new details of the game’s artisanal Mystic on Blizzard’s Diablo blogRead the rest of this entry »

Were you looking the other way when the Diablo 3 open beta launched last weekend? I’m sorry. If reports are to be believed, the servers wobbled like a gyroscope at the end of a good spin, so you if you missed out you probably saved yourself from being teased by the title screen. There is some comfort to be had in the Witch Doctor overview video Blizzard have just released: it’s his life story and shows how he’ll turn NPCs against each other and launch flame-engulfed bats into the faces of those that cross him. Judging by the video beneath, that seems to be everyone.Read the rest of this entry »

EA have issued a clarification to Gamespy that while you will have to have an internet connection to launch SimCity, it will not boot you off if your connection goes down. Which is to say, it’s not as egregious as others’ “always-on” DRM, but we maintain is still an unnecessary and game-crippling mistake, which we really hope they will reverse before release. That the game won’t stop working if your connection goes down sounds great, but it makes no useful difference to those who wish to play the ostensibly single-player game without an internet connection, whatever the cause. As we’ve said before, the online features sound like they’ll superbly enhance your single-player experience, but enforcing them is cruel and stupid, and renders the game broken for enormous numbers of players. We desperately hope to see EA backing down from this position before release. Just as we expect to see Blizzard come to their senses and not release a self-sabotaged version of Diablo 3. The reality is, unofficial versions of the games will appear very soon after release, offering useful features that the publishers’ versions of the games will not. That’s simply crazy. We’ve contacted EA to ask if we can talk to them about this all.

I must confess that I’m immune to whatever charms Blizzard’s games possess. If I am a waterdrop then Blizzard are a water lily pad, scattering me across their surface – I just want to be absorbed by the gaming nymphaeaceae, but I can’t. But while my fingers don’t quite click with their games, my eyes do. So I got excited when they decided now was the time to release a load of skills videos for Diablo 3. The 20 skills on show are mostly new, so if you have the beta you won’t have encountered most of them. They’re unencumbered by the alteration runes, so this is raw rarr! I love the dancing voodoo doll that distracts enemies enough for the players to mash their face, and if I played it I’d use that all the time.Read the rest of this entry »

In a somewhat fatalistic move, Blizzard has announced that you – you personally – will die. At some point, by accident or dreadful confluence of events, your body will cease to function, collapse, or possibly be run over by a train in a moment best described by taking a tube of toothpaste and squeezing it with the cap still on. Your friends and family will, hopefully, mourn you, as the carcass that was your vehicle through this cynical world is lowered into the ground, burned to ashes, or eaten by Welsh cannibals. Truly, we should take a moment to-

Looking forward to hacking your way through the armies of Hell? Blizzivision (a subsidiary of Activard) has finally announced Diablo 3’s final, definitely final, absolutely no-kidding final release date… ish. It’s due to land in Q2 this year, unless they decide to rewrite the entire thing and turn it into one of those point and click adventures that are currently taking the world by storm.Read the rest of this entry »

Diablo III‘s ‘always-on’ DRM is obviously a matter of much controversy, albeit a more nuanced one than that of Ubisoft. Where Ubisoft implemented the grotesque system purely as a claimed measure to fight piracy, Blizzard’s logic at least has some elements that offer benefits to the player. Battle.net, online ranking, drop-in-drop-out co-op, the auction house, and constant live monitoring of your progress, and monitoring to prevent cheating, can all be argued to be in the players’ favour, in a way that Settlers VII crashing its single player because the internet blipped does not. But it doesn’t make the problem go away, and I want to strongly argue that Blizzard reconsider their decision, in the face of its simply breaking their game. Because no matter how perfect your connection, it will affect you.

Activision, despite closing down studios as fast as they can, are at least planning on releasing some games. 2012, they promise, will feature two Blizzard titles. That’s if neither of them appear this year, anyway. Which they expect they won’t. But they still might. But they probably won’t. The two games in question most likely being the next portion of StarCraft II, Heart Of The Swarm, and of course Diablo 3. Which they’ll probably only release once they’ve got over 3 million followers on Twitter, or something equally inane.

Ooh, excitement! I’ve posted Blizzard’s splendid Wizard class trailer after the jump. Annoyingly, we weren’t able to get out to Blizzcon, but plenty of our journalistic brethren were and Shacknews have come up with the Diablo 3 goods. There’s some hands-on impressions here, and two length videos of the action from the newly-unveiled Wizard-class here. Blizzard’s info page on the spell-chucker is here. My thoughts? We are totally going to kill some demons and/or zombie lords. Yes.